FIRAQ GORAKHPURI AND ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

                                           

FIRAQ GORAKHPURI AND  ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

"Aadmi ka aadmi hona hi mushkil hai firaq 

Ilm o fun mazhab siyasat jis ko chaahe poochh lo "...Firaq Gorakhpuri

(For a man to be a human being 

has itself become impossible, Firaq.

Ask whomsoever you will about matters of knowledge, art, religion, or politics.)

The couplet asserts that the ethical and spiritual ideal of  Humanity has collapsed. In every public domain , the intellect, the aesthetic, the sacred, and the civic conduct is no longer guided by fairness or humanity.

Firaq Gorakhpuri’s couplet reads as a precise Indian articulation of Schopenhauer’s pessimism. For Schopenhauer, human beings are driven by a blind Will, and reason is seldom used to transcend it, but rather to rationalise ego, appetite, and domination. Firaq observes the same failure across the four pillars of civilisation. When he says "ask whomsoever you will about  ilm, fun, mazhab, siyasat", he is stating that no institution remains uncontaminated. Knowledge has become sophistry, art has become display, religion has become faction, and politics has become expedience. Thus "to be a human being"and   to act with compassion, truthfulness, and self-restraint , has become the most arduous vocation. In Schopenhauerian terms, this is the tragedy of a species endowed with intellect yet enslaved by Will, wherein culture exists without cultivation.

Firaq’s poetry carries every element requisite for classification as literature of humanity. He is tall in vision, indic in sensibility, full of clarity and profound in moral judgement. His idiom is Hindustani, but his concern is universal: the dignity of the human person. He does not lament from cynicism, but from a classical humanist standard against which he measures the age and finds it wanting. Like Schopenhauer, he diagnoses the disease of the age; unlike the German philosopher, he retains the lyric faith that poetry itself may be one of the few remaining spaces where "aadmi ka aadmi hona" is still possible. It is this fusion of ethical severity with aesthetic grace that places Firaq within the lineage of world literature concerned not with nations or sects, but with man as such.

( Avtar Mota )

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